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German Defense Minister Continues Her Indo-Pacific Campaign

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German Defense Minister Continues Her Indo-Pacific Campaign

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer imagines a larger role for her country in the region, though in prudent terms.

German Defense Minister Continues Her Indo-Pacific Campaign
Credit: Flickr/NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Speaking virtually at an event organized by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF) on November 5, German Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer once again reaffirmed her country’s desire to play a larger role in the Indo-Pacific. While Kramp-Karrenbauer maintained that Germany’s Indo-Pacific push is not directed at anybody, her emphasis on the need to protect territorial sovereignty around the world – including in the Indo-Pacific – as well as her assertion that “freedom of navigation [in the Indo-Pacific] is under threat” cleared reflects Germany’s growing anxiety about China’s assertive behavior in the region and globally.

Interestingly, Kramp-Karrenbauer positioned her country’s strategic challenge in triangular terms, situating it alongside the growing China-U.S. strategic competition, and noting that Germany simultaneously maintains a strong economic relationship with China while enjoying a “values-based” partnership with the United States. Also notable was her normative, although implicit, equation of Russia’s actions in Crimea in 2014 with “similar developments elsewhere,” in the Indo-Pacific – a veiled reference to Chinese maritime aggression in the South China Sea. The United States under the Trump administration has long and explicitly clubbed Russian and Chinese behavior together as examples of revisionism.

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